Anyone who has tried to use the immensely popular ‘housing’ section of Craigslist to do some apartment hunting is well aware of its limitations: aside from breaking listings into basic neighborhoods, for the most part they lack any structure, which can make them a pain to browse through, especially when you’re trying to compare more than one apartment. Y Combinator startup RentHop is looking to offer an alternative, featuring thousands of structured housing listings that are much easier to search though and compare. Of course, there are plenty of other sites that offer comprehensive housing listings, so RentHop is also looking to differentiate itself by eliminating housing broker fees
Today we launch the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 . This is a new, constantly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies, as compiled by our partner YouNoodle
For the past few weeks, TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I have been pulling together speakers and demos for our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp this Friday. What started as a roundtable and a few demos, quickly grew into a full-fledged mini-conference with 45 speakers, including nearly 20 startup and product demos. Other than TechCrunch50, I’ve never seen so many CEOs and companies begging to be present at a conference before. It barely fits into one day, but we’re gonna pack it in. The CrunchUp is nearly sold out, with nearly 400 attendees signed up so far. There are about 20 tickets left. (You can buy one here for $295, and is also the only way left to get into our annual August Capital Summer party ). Some people in Silicon Valley are already complaining about the name Real-Time Stream, so we’ll give away a ticket to whoever can come up with the best alternative name in comments.
One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything.
Before everyone gets in a huff, let’s consider Amazon’s intentions with these patent applications. Surely they would never allow advertisements to be placed in books which you have purchased legitimately at full price, so let’s put that out of our heads. But what if you could take a few bucks off the cover price at the cost of a few contextual ads relating (if possible) to the book’s content
According to The Hollywood Reporter , movie studio Universal has won a bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game “Asteroids” . Initially released as an arcade game back in 1979, Asteroids featured a triangular space ship that needed to be navigated through an asteroid field. The object was to shoot and destroy masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both, so we suspect it will not turn out to be romantic comedy.
There’s been quite a bit of controversy over the past several hours over words and images related to Twitter being used by third-party developers. Yesterday, Twitter seemed to threaten one party over the use of the word “tweet” and some UI elements that were similar to Twitter’s own.
Yesterday, we poked fun at Microsoft’s tacky $10,000 online treasure hunt to get people to use IE8, at the domain TenGrandIsBuriedHere.com . We were hardly the only ones
Famous angel investor Ron Conway’s investment focus on real time startups earned him the moniker “ Real Time Ron ” by his close friends. But he’s certainly not the only venture capitalist out there focusing on this space. New York based betaworks , an incubator/VC, is also right in the thick of things.
By now you either are addicted to Spymaster , or absolutely can’t stand it. The viral Twitter-based game in which you do spy-like things such as “assassinate” your followers is a great time-waster .
